State of Homelab 2026

ceinewydd

Looking forward to the follow up post, State of Bunker 2029.

atlgator

You are doing more than I am (e.g. synchronized file storage, books, music), but I have radarr, sonarr, overseerr, plex, and supporting apps for movies and tv shows. Plex is available externally through its remote access feature. For the actual request system, I run OpenClaw with an Overseerr extension. This allows me to manage titles remotely via Telegram without any kind of tunnel or SSO. Simple and gets the job done for the solo-user scenario.

nateberkopec

For secrets management, I basically just use fnox everywhere ( https://fnox.jdx.dev/ ). It's a frontend to tons more options than sops, although `age` is still included. I also think the DX is better but to each their own.

oofbaroomf

Seems like it's down right now. I guess that's the "State of Homelab"? :)

jsphweid

This is not so much a fantasy about "being independent". Instead, it's a fantasy about being a sysadmin.

arjie

Cloudflare Tunnel is a wonderful thing. In fact, Cloudflare itself is fantastic for homelabbers because it gives you so much for free. I used to just host direct on my own home IP, but nowadays I find it easier to just `cloudflared`. Don't have to worry about the firewall and any breaches into my network and all of that stuff. I started from a similar place as you and then eventually now my IaaC for my homelab is just idempotent bash scripts written by Claude. The pattern I find with dependencies is that they have the property that someone wants to change some attribute and so the program needs to evolve for the attribute to be changeable. This means programs evolve to have many hinges and the interactions cause bugs one cannot reason about. My needs for the homelab are fairly simple and the script can encode all the information it needs. As a human, writing such a script is tedious. As a human with an AI assistant, I've found that this is so much easier to worry about because bash is a fairly stable target. Anyway, apart from that, I landed on using systemd's containers that use podman but otherwise not too different. My (far less polished) version of this post as a memory aid to myself: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/One_Quick_Way_To_Host_A_WebA...

willio58

I recently did the math and was floored to see I’d be spending 1.3k per year on streaming alone. So I said screw it, bought a nas and 36 TB of hard drives and set up an arr stack. I cancelled all of our streaming subscriptions 2 months ago and it’s been the best decision I’ve ever made. Plus my whole family is doing the same from all around town. I’m saving my extended family on the order of 5-6k per year total. The nas is going to pay itself off in a few months, then it’s all savings from there. If only these media billionaires didn’t get so greedy, I would have happily kept paying them. Especially with Claude code, setting up something like this is basically just sitting down and prompting for a couple of hours. The emerging benefits are nice too. Like we don’t have to sift through junk of Netflix or Hulu to find stuff we would actually watch. All of it is stuff we would watch because we added it ourselves. Really fun!

cadamsdotcom

There should be volunteer groups at local libraries running these services for their local communities. It’d be a great way for kids to learn to operate services and a great alternative for anyone who wants to use the fantastic open source stuff that’s out there but lacks expertise or time.

znnajdla

In Ukraine I have visited SaaS company offices serving production traffic with an actual bunker like this. Physically underground.

AdrienPoupa

This is very cool, but you should not use Cloudflare Tunnels to stream media. This is forbidden by their terms of service (or at the very least not the intended use of Tunnels and they may disable your service). Use Wireguard or Tailscale instead. https://www.xda-developers.com/cloudflare-tunnels-are-great-...

oaiey

Sounds more like a state of the private download engine to me :)

colordrops

> I originally intended to try out the NixOS for the sake of reproducible builds and being able to store the configuration in a single place but got too lazy about it. Ironically once I got over the hump of learning NixOS, I can't imagine using anything else for declarative configuration. Too lazy to use a traditional system which requires custom wiring.

nodesocket

I have a homelab with 4x Raspberry Pi 4's running Kubernetes a GMKtec Intel i5-12450H and a ProLiant ML350p Gen8 (which uses an ungodly amount of power). I'd add the following software/tools which have been awesome: - Portainer running on GMKtec & ProLiant - Dozzle (docker log viewer) on GMKtec & ProLiant - Beszel (server monitoring, awesome) all hosts - Kubetail (Kubernetes log viewer on Pi K8s) - HomeAssistant - Jellyfin - UptimeKuma (uptime and notifications) - Semaphore UI (ansible playbook runner) - Metabase (querying and visualization for dbs)

SuperMouse

For me it's a Intel n100 box with Proxmox. Auto Updates (without auto reboot) fully activated). It just works. For accessing my home network I've rented a 1€-VPS that acts as a Wireguard connection hub.

import

> There’s something appealing in that idea, being independent and prepared, a male fantasy likely never coming to life There’s still cloudflare in the middle of the everything and it doesn’t make it “independent”.

lorenzohess

How do you feel about the privacy implications of Cloudflare theoretically being able to read all your data? I guess this theoretical downside is outweighed by the practical upsides?